Esa News

Alexander Gerst, a German astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) offered humanity a special gift on Christmas, with 12500 photos of the planet sequenced into a stunning six-minute timelapse video.

The effects of climate change are now so profound that gravity itself is changing. The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Friday that Antarctica has lost enough ice in only three years to cause a shift in the Earth's gravitational pull.

St. Petersburg -
More than a dozen species of corals are the newest addition to the Endangered Species Act, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Announced on Tuesday. The listing of 20 species is the largest Endangered Species Act ruling ever.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta Comet mission has chosen five likely landing sites for its Philae's lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The lander is scheduled to descend down to the comet's nucleus in November.

Paris -
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) comet-chaser mission, already 10 years in transit, has rendezvoused with its target the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet. The ESA Rosetta probe enters orbit around the comet today, Wednesday.

Warwick -
The European Space Agency announced Wednesday that a new space-based observatory to search for planets orbiting alien stars will form the third plank of the ESA’s medium-class (M-class) science missions.

Cayenne -
The European Space Agency launched a new satellite, Thursday, which is expected to "boldly go where no satellite has gone before," providing the most accurate three-dimensional map of our part of the Milky Way.

Cologne -
As the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter approaches the tenth anniversary of arrival in orbit at the Red Planet, the ESA has assembled a fascinating topographical ‘fly-by’ of Mars.

East Kilbride -
Examination of a meteorite that’s believed to have fallen to Earth around 3,000 years ago has provided clues as to how Mars lost its atmosphere, previously rich in carbon dioxide (CO2).

Darmstadt -
The European Space Agency (ESA) switched off its Planck space telescope for good at 12:10:27 UT, Thursday. Planck spent over four years peering back in time, studying background radiation from the Big Bang that gave birth to our Universe.

Edinburgh -
Latest observations on Arctic sea ice from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cryosat mission, presented at a symposium in Edinburgh, Scotland, last week, reveal a new record low volume of sea ice in the northern polar region.

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Monday, the selection of ‘Biomass’ as the subject of its seventh Earth Explorer mission. The planned satellite will measure, to great accuracy, biomass and carbon stored in the world’s forests.

Obtained from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, spectacular new high resolution images were yesterday released of the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion.

Early yesterday morning NASA released details of an observed solar phenomenon, an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection with the potential to disrupt satellites and communications over the next one to three days.

The European Space Agency and the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, announced today that they entered a formal agreement to work together on the ExoMars programme, looking ahead to the launch of two missions to the planet Mars in 2016 and 2018.

NASA and the European Space Agency this week announced that NASA would be participating in the ESA’s Euclid mission scheduled for launch in 2020. Euclid is a space telescope whose purpose is to investigate cosmic dark matter and dark energy.

The Planck space telescope operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) this week unveiled a spectacular image of a bridge of hot gases connecting a pair of galaxy clusters across millions of light years of space.

The Arctic sea ice looks as if it will be hitting a record low by the end of August, according to satellite data. Reports on August 13, 2012, show that the ice extent was 186,000 square miles below the 2007 data.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is planning to launch a space mission in 2022 to explore Jupiter's moons. ESA officials say the mission, Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE), will reach Jupiter in 2030 and spend three years studying its moons.

The European Space Agency announced its fifth Automated Transfer Vehicle has been named Georges Lemaître, after the Belgian scientist who provided the first observational estimation of the Hubble constant, which was later called the Big Bang theory.

Brussels -
Should part of future Space Budgets be allocated directly to end-users of satellite services? This was one of the issues discussed at the recent Eurisy Conference "Securing the benefits of satellite services for European society", held in Brussels.

How would the world react to the threat of an asteroid impact?
This is the topic of a three-day workshop on Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and the dangers they present, that will be held in Darmstadt, Germany next week.

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Esa Image

Artist's impression of the ESA's Euclid space telescope scheduled for a 2020 launch

European Space Agency - ESA Press

Rosetta spacecraft's OSIRIS narrow-angle camera obtained this close-up detail of a smooth region on the "base" of the "body" section of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on August 6, 2014.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team

Mission control: A bee-hive of activity on Wednesday, Nov. 12.

ESA

Envisat image features a cloud-free France acquired this image on 15 August 2009.

European Space Agency

The Rosetta spacecraft.

ESA

XMM-Newton X-ray view of Messier 16

VLT/ISAAC/McCaughrean & Andersen/AIP/ESO

Left is an image of the nearby spiral Andromeda galaxy: The rectangle highlights the 7,900 light-years-wide region probed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope near the galaxy's hub; there a grouping of stars shows as a bright area, and the blue dots sprinkled throughout are extremely hot ultra-blue stars.

NASA; ESA; B. Williams and J. Dalcanton, University of Washington

Ariane 5 solid booster is the main workhorse of the European Space Agency

Tom Page

The PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission will identify and study thousands of exoplanetary systems, with emphasis on discovering and characterising Earth-sized planets and super-Earths.

NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope produced this highly detailed image of the Orion Nebula, taking over 105 Hubble orbits using all the telescope's imaging instruments simultaneously to capture the cosmic spectacle.

The Cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by Planck, is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380 000 years old

ESA / Planck

Comparing the size of the James Webb Space Telescope due for launch in 2018 with the Hubble Space Telescope

Wikimedia Commons - Bobarino

Artist's impression of the four Cluster spacecraft, flying in tetrahedron formation

Picture: ESA

The ESA and NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured these images of the Sun spitting out a coronal mass ejection (CME) on March 15, 2013, from 3:24 to 4:00 a.m. EDT. This type of image is known as a coronagraph, since a disk is placed over the Sun to better see the dimmer atmosphere around it, called the corona.

ESA&NASA/SOHO

A sketch (not to scale) showing axions (blue) streaming out from the Sun, converting in the Earth's magnetic field (red) into X-rays (orange), which are then detected by the XMM-Newton observatory.

University of Leicester

The anisotropies of the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by Planck. The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe.

ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Schematic of Arctic ice thickness in 2013 presented at the Living Planet Symposium 2013